FREGE, KRIPKE AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF NAMES

Istanbul was Constantinople,
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople,
Been a long time gone, Constantinople,
Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night.
 Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople,
So if you've a date in Constantinople
She'll be waiting in Istanbul.

The philosophy of language is one of those niche areas of philosophy that you don't hear much about in the mainstream amidst all the more popular "I think therefore I am" stuff. There's probably a reason for that - language philosophy tends to be the kind of dry, analytical field that deconstructs stuff you already had figured out before you were able to walk.

Think for a moment about the concept of the proper noun, that special kind of noun that begins with a capital letter and serves to name some particular thing, like David, Chicago or Wednesday. As opposed to regular nouns like 'cat,' which refer to a category of things, proper nouns single out and identify some singular, independent thing of which only one exists. You've had that particular concept mastered since you were about two years old, but philosophers (not quite as wise as two-year-olds) have been puzzling over it for centuries.

Consider the word Istanbul. You know what I mean when I'm talking about Istanbul, it's a city in Turkey. According to usually-good-enough common sense, the concept of Istanbul is synonymous with that actual city. I am not talking about just any city. I'm not talking about Batman. I'm talking about the one and only Istanbul. But it turns out that (of course) there is a gigantic philosophical problem with this theory, a problem so huge that people have lived and died dedicating their entire lives to trying to untangle it. The problem is that, according to that old ragtime tune, Istanbul is Constantinople.


Here's why this fact is like a giant turd in philosophy's apple juice: "Istanbul is Constantinople" is an informative statement. If you didn't know that Istanbul and Constantinople (and worse, Byzantium as well) are all the same city, then you've learned something new. On the other hand, if I say "Istanbul is Istanbul," then you're really not learning anything at all. "Istanbul is Istanbul" would never have made it to the Billboard magazine charts, nor would it have been more popularly covered by They Might Be Giants in the early 90s, because it's a completely meaningless sentence. (In that sense, perhaps it could have been pulled off by R.E.M. or Fall Out Boy). But if you look at this through the annoyingly mathematical lens of analytic philosophy, you'll find we have somewhat of a paradox:

If X = Istanbul, Y = Constantinople, and Z = the actual city to which both names refer, then:

X = Z
Y = Z
and
X = Y

...are all synonymous statements. They're all self-evident, all mean exactly the same thing. Problem is, go back to:

Istanbul = Constantinople
Istanbul = Istanbul

...and suddenly we have two statements that mean two different things. Saying that Istanbul is Constantinople is not the same as saying that Istanbul is Istanbul, because one is meaningful and the other is not. So neither the word Istanbul nor the word Constantinople can directly refer to and be synonymous with the common thing that we are trying to identify. While most of us shrug and say "we can deal with this," philosophers scream to the heavens and demand we have a philosophy that can decode this mystery.

So what is the real relationship between the word Istanbul and the city we're calling Istanbul? What is going on in your brain when you read the word Istanbul and envision a bunch of minarets and turbans and half-moons and awful candy? There are two main theories:

Descriptivism argues that a name is a shorthand for a description. It's a way of zipping up a whole lot of data in a small amount of space. This is the solution Gottlob Frege came up with so that he could manage to sleep at night. It makes sense because most of the statements we actually make in our day to day lives are descriptive ones. Whenever we say that "the sky is blue" or "Natasha forgot to wear pants again today," we are describing the world around us. A descriptivist like Frege would argue that, when we say "Istanbul," we are actually saying "the largest city in Turkey." Likewise, when we say "Turkey," we're actually saying "the Asian country that is bordered by Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Azerbaijan." And when we say "Greece, Bulgaria, Georgia, Armenia..." Look, you get the picture. According to Frege, a name is like a website that you save in your favourites folder so that you don't have to type in the full web address every time. He didn't use that exact analogy because he died in 1925, but I think he would have endorsed it.

"But wait," you might be saying, "that still doesn't solve the problem! Gottlob Frege wasted his life and had a silly name!" Well, you're right, but he did try to address this. According to Frege, the words Istanbul and Constantinople are describing identical things, but they differ in terms of the "sense" or context in which they're being used. While Istanbul refers to the city since its Arabic conquest, Constantinople refers to the same city before that time but after Byzantium was overthrown by the Romans. While we're describing the same physical location, the words remain unique in terms of the sense in which they are used.

If this all sounds pretty rock-solid and intuitive, then you are clearly new to philosophy, because (as always) someone came along to throw a flaming poop-covered cinderblock through the window of this philosophy party. His name is Saul Kripke, and he thinks descriptivism is absolute garbage. Here's why:

Consider the name Shakespeare. If we're working with descriptivism, then when we say Shakespeare, we're really saying the guy who wrote Hamlet, Macbeth and Othello or whatever your favourite Shakespearean play is, Henry the Seventeenth or whatever. That's how we know Shakespeare today, and if you ask anybody who "Shakespeare" was, they're likely to give you a funny look before they rattle off this description - "Shakespeare was this and that and he lived whenever and he wrote this and the other thing."

There is, however, a popular conspiracy theory about Shakespeare. Roland Emmerich is making a movie about it that will probably make him another billion blood-dollars. The theory goes that Shakespeare did not actually write the plays that we attribute to him. One of the more popular alternative theories (the "Baconian Theory") states that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Kevin Bacon.


The Baconian Theory is really just a fringe belief held by a few aluminium-hat crazies, but it's relevant to us because it presents at least the technical possibility that Bacon wrote the plays we today falsely attribute to Shakespeare. If this turns out to be true, then the descriptivist theory flies out the window, because when we say "the dude who wrote Hamlet" then we are talking about Kevin Bacon. Therefore, according to descriptivism, when we say "Shakespeare" we are literally saying "Kevin Bacon," but this doesn't make any sense because Shakespeare was still Shakespeare and even if he was Kevin Bacon's butler and signed his name off on Kevin Bacon's plays while Kevin Bacon shook a spear at him, he was not Kevin Bacon. He was Shakespeare, not Kevin Bacon.

Kripke instead proposes the alternative causal theory to describe how names actually work. According to Kripke, when we say Shakespeare, we are not shorthanding a description of who we falsely think Shakespeare actually was. We may be wrong about what Shakespeare actually achieved in his life, but when we talk about Shakespeare we're actually just perpetuating a causal chain of naming that began when his mother named him "William Shakespeare." In other words, we're still talking about the same dude even if he never wrote a thing and instead died in an alley from a heroin overdose for the shame of never having achieved anything.

But alas! Detractors to the causal theory have hit back. Consider again our example of Istanbul. The name "Istanbul" comes from an old Arabic term that translates to "The City." It's easy to imagine that some people got confused at some point when they heard people talking about Istanbul, figuring that they were referring to Constantinople, when in actual fact they were just talking about Batman. If Kripke's causal theory turns out to be true, then Istanbul is not Constantinople, and if you've a date in Constantinople, she'll be waiting in Constantinople while you foolishly sit in a restaurant in Batman drinking glass after glass of wine, feeling sorry for yourself because you're fat and nobody will ever love you.

Kripke's theory would seem to suggest that, much like Shakespeare, our concept of "Istanbul" is simply wrong because we're thinking of the city formerly known as Constantinople when in fact Istanbul is, and always has been, Batman. This also seems to make no sense. Going back to the descriptivist theory, Istanbul is Constantinople because enough people have referred to Constantinople as "Istanbul" to effectively render Constantinople a long time gone for reasons that are nobody's business but the Turks.

So, which theory is correct? We're still waiting to hear back on that, but at least next time you hear on the radio that Istanbul is Constantinople you can call the station and set them straight that Istanbul may or may not be Constantinople for mysterious reasons that philosophy has yet to unravel.
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